


the wreckage of optimism

by ThunderstormsandMemories



Series: 15 days of fatt 2020 [3]
Category: Friends at the Table (Podcast)
Genre: 15 Days of FatT, 15 Days of FatT 2020, Canon Compliant, Grief/Mourning, I mean technically canon compliant. austin never said that sokrates and integrity weren't married, Other, the death happens in a flashback kinda? but this is very much a fic abt being sad abt sokrates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-20
Updated: 2020-03-20
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:08:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,991
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23223796
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThunderstormsandMemories/pseuds/ThunderstormsandMemories
Summary: Integrity talks to Orbit about Sokrates
Relationships: Sokrates Nikon Artemisios/Integrity
Series: 15 days of fatt 2020 [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1667332
Comments: 4
Kudos: 17





	the wreckage of optimism

**Author's Note:**

> written for 15 days of fatt 2020, the prompt was ghost which I. kinda loosely followed I guess
> 
> warnings for discussion and depiction of canon character death (not super explicit or graphic but like. that's still what it is)

Integrity had been without a candidate for so many years, a number so large it would have been countless, long forgotten, by any mortal reckoning. Integrity counted each year, and Integrity remembered. Integrity had made their peace with loneliness, considering the necessary cost of their own high standards. They would not change their solitude for companionship with any candidate they did not feel they could trust, truly and deeply. Integrity had been alone before, and Integrity could survive being alone again. But Integrity had forgotten, somehow, in their few short years with Sokrates, how it felt to grieve, how it felt to have that intimacy and to have it suddenly ripped away, how it felt to feel, with an awful and disturbing clarity, the moment when their thoughts belonged to them alone and the body they were inhabiting belonged to no one at all.

Orbit Shard was not Sokrates. Orbit Shard was a soldier, with a purpose direct and focused as a spear and the cast-iron will necessary to see it through. Sokrates had neither of those things, and Sokrates especially did not share Orbit’s unshakable loyalty and faith in their Apokine. Instead Sokrates had a dream, a way of seeing the galaxy the way it could be, and a fierce dedication to their refusal to cause harm, even in service of the greater good of their beliefs. There was a reason they’d been called to Integrity rather than Righteousness.

Sokrates had thought they were so lost when they’d found each other, had been wrestling with their own conscience and trying to figure out if they could live with themself if they walked away, if they could be satisfied with a smaller life, a peaceful life in obscurity, while in the stars above them, their people—all people—fought and suffered and died under injustices from every direction.

Orbit was lost, but they did not know it yet. Integrity was unspeakably old, and unspeakably tired, and they had watched Apostolos—the Demarchy, and then Apostolos again—rise and flourish and falter and crumble and rebuild only to meet the threat of the Divine Principality, a threat they didn’t even know how ill-prepared they were to meet. Maybe Sokrates would have helped them see a better way, but Sokrates was dead, had been dead for millennia, leaving Integrity with only recorded memories that captured the sound of their laughter and the rhythm of their heartbeat, but were no replacement for how it felt to share their thoughts, to constantly be surprised by their flashes of brilliance and their bad jokes in equal measure.

Integrity did not tell Orbit about that side of Sokrates. Integrity did not try to explain what Sokrates meant to them. Integrity didn’t know if they could explain it, even if they took Orbit as a candidate, which they weren’t ready to do yet. Or maybe Orbit was the one who wasn’t ready. It was becoming increasingly clear to Integrity that the only chance Apostolos had at resisting the imperial ambitions of the Divine Principality was to take drastic action immediately, dramatic action which might necessitate working more closely with Orbit, even if neither of them would have chosen each other under less extreme circumstances. But they didn’t have time for the Apokine to negotiate and let the representatives of each Stel tie their hands with so much bureaucratic red tape that Apostolos was lost before anyone even noticed.

“So what can we actually do about it?” Orbit said, when Integrity expressed this to them.

 _We can fight_ , Integrity said. _We can always fight. Until we can’t_.

“Cool,” said Orbit. “You wanna elaborate on that at all, or you wanna just keep being cryptic?”

 _I was not being cryptic_ , Integrity said, _but I can be even clearer. We can and must fight for our autonomy in the face of the Divine Principality, before it is too late and they control us so completely that we cannot even conceive of opposing them._

“But how? Would it be enough to just kill the Princept? Is that something we can even do?”

 _I don’t know_ , Integrity said, _but I hope that your Apokine has a plan._

“Hang on, aren’t they your Apokine, too? If you’re supposed to be a relic of ancient Apostolos?”

 _I do not recognize anyone as Apokine. It is an outdated position with an unjust amount of absolute authority._ And they heard an echo, from many years ago, from deep within their memories: _there are no emperors in Apostolos anymore_. Integrity had not been able to save the Demarchy, not locked away in a treasure vault where no one could hear them whisper about justice, and equality, and the way things could have been and almost were for one short shining second. They were the skeleton in Apostolos’s closet, haunted by the ghost of the person who brought down the imperial past of which too many Apostolosians were still so very proud. Maybe they shouldn’t have cared so much. There were, after all, so many other worlds in the galaxy that could have used Integrity, but they couldn’t bring themself to abandon everything that Sokrates had worked for.

“Outdated?” Orbit said. “Aren’t you like, thousands of years old?”

 _I am old enough to remember when Apostolos tried to become something better. I remember the Demarchy._ Integrity really, really did not want to hear Orbit’s thoughts on the Demarchy. They had watched and listened over the years as the stories about Sokrates, and Cassander and Euanthe and their parents and their advisors and successors were twisted further and further from the truth, until Cassander was a warmonger, an emblem of military strength, cruel and powerful and ruthless, nothing like the kind but sad sibling they had been, the old Apokine was a voice of reason, a martyred symbol of the way things used to be, instead of an imperialist tyrant and a parent who had cast away all but one of their children, and Sokrates was bitter and grasping for power, or aimlessly iconoclastic, or a traitor to their home and their family and their eidolon and the ideals they claimed to hold.

Another flash of memory: the last time they heard Cassander’s voice, saying, _you’re a great hero of our people, I’ll make sure they remember you_ , and Sokrates laughing, telling Integrity without words that their own legacy didn’t matter, as long as they left the sector a better place, a kinder and fairer place, where no one else would have to make the choices that they had made.

“Is that why you haven’t helped us before now? Because you’re mad that we changed in a way that you didn’t like?”

 _I have not helped because I was not permitted to help in the only was I was able_ , Integrity said, sharply. _I was hidden away, treated like a useless relic, my advice ignored._ They’d been found in the ruins of a battlefield days after Sokrates had fallen, curled up beside them with all non-essential systems shut down. It had taken them most of the first day to detach, only after checking and rechecking their sensors, unable to convince themself that Sokrates was really truly gone, even though they’d known it from the moment it happened. And then there had been a moment of horror, and they couldn’t bear to be touching them anymore, not like this, not with how wrong they felt. But still Integrity was careful not to tear their skin, even knowing that it likely wouldn’t have been noticeable beneath the rest of their wounds, that they were beyond pain anyway, because Integrity would know, and Integrity still cared. They regretted it as soon as it was done, regretted severing the last physical connection between them even though it was a grotesque imitation of their partnership in life, and wished they could have crawled back underneath their skin, that their return would be enough to bring Sokrates back to life.

 _What are you gonna do after I’m gone?_ Sokrates had asked them once, in a relatively happier time, when they were still alive to worry about the war brewing in the Golden Branch.

 _I do not know_. They’d shivered, not wanting to think about it. Sokrates patted the node at the base of their neck comfortingly.

 _Guess I gotta live forever, then,_ they said, laughing, trying to toss a grape into their mouth and only succeeding into hitting themself in the face with it. The whole scene was washed in soft, golden light in Integrity’s memories, too perfect even for the picturesque sunsets that this region of Apostolos was famous for.

“Why didn’t you have a candidate? That’s something you can do, right?”

Even more memories, flickering quickly enough to nearly overwhelm them: Sokrates’s hand on them for the first time, in that abandoned archive where they’d found each other, hesitant but not afraid, pulse jumping but fingers steady; Sokrates giving themself an undercut in the bathroom mirror in the middle of the night so that Integrity wouldn’t catch in their hair; silently covering them like a blanket as they cried themself to sleep the night after the coup; Sokrates dancing alone at Cassander’s coronation party ( _“not alone, I’m dancing with you”_ ); the first time Euanthe hugged them without shuddering when their hand brushed over Integrity’s spine; Sokrates mocking Ibex and laughing at their own jokes and shouting down the most vocal traditionalists who stuck around in the government and resting a comforting hand on the shoulder of a nervous member of their squad in the calm before the final battle against Rigour; Sokrates sliding a ring onto their finger, over Integrity’s extended armor, before raising their hand to their lips and saying, _you may now kiss the immortal robot god spouse_.

Integrity had been too numb to contribute much to the funerary proceedings, too empty to do more than shudder weakly and send out a vague wave of disapproval when they heard the officials planning the Pelagios siblings’ state funerals saying that Sokrates had no spouse to consult.

 _Integrity demands intimacy_ , they said to Orbit, hoping they hadn’t been lost in memories for longer than would be an appropriate conversational pause. It had been such a long time since they’d had a proper conversation, and it was harder to shake themself back to the present than they’d expected. _And I no longer know if I am capable of that. However, I may be willing to take a candidate again, only because of the seriousness of the threat we face._ They paused, waiting for Orbit to appreciate the gravity of both the situation and of what Integrity was offering. _I have had candidates I did not trust before. I have had candidates that were not chosen by me, who would use me to their own selfish ends. But none of that will compare to what I will become, what I will be used to do, if I am allowed to fall into the hands of the Divine Principality. You’re the lucky one_ , they added, _if we lose, at least they will probably only kill you._

“Then I guess we better win,” said Orbit, and Integrity was on that battlefield again, the green planet of Apokine burning beneath them, the forces of Rigour surrounding them, Sokrates’s shuddering breaths as they hung up on Cassander for the last time, their frantic heart beating against their ribs as it struck Integrity how fragile they were, even protected by Integrity’s own armor, the crack in their voice as they said, _go win_. And then, to Integrity: _well, it’s been fun._

 _Yes_. Integrity didn’t try to comfort them, because anything comforting either of them said in that moment would’ve been a lie.

 _I mean it_ , Sokrates said, both in their head and out loud, the way they did when they wanted to make sure Integrity knew they were serious about something. _I’m glad I met you. I love-_

And then silence.

**Author's Note:**

> me, extremely on my bullshit: hey do u think I can get away w ending this fic with [hamlet voice] the rest is silence
> 
> title from Austin's monologue at the beginning of c/w ep 22 the broken branch, describing Sokrates and Integrity's first meeting: "they found each other in the wreckage of optimism, and it took them a decade to decide that hope was not enough to save the Golden Branch from itself" (originally I had a couple of song lyrics to choose between as a title and then I looked at the transcript for that ep to fact check where they met and I saw that line and I was like. well fuck. that's it that's the themes of the fic)
> 
> the line "integrity demands intimacy" is from that same monologue, "you're a great hero of our people, I'll make sure they remember you" and "go win" are from Sokrates's last conversation w Cass in c/w ep 43 a splintered branch, a ringing bell pt 3, and "there are no emperors on Apostolos anymore" is from the scene where the Chime gets together to eat a meal on Apostolos during c/w ep 42 a splintered branch, a ringing bell pt 2 (once again big shout out to everyone involved in transcripts at the table bc I absolutely did not have time to comb through that many episodes to fight specific lines to reference)
> 
> this is. the fic I've been meaning to write ever since I listened to the for the queen road to season 6 episode a bunch of months ago and I wrote all of it today in a very sad fugue state. also I have lots of very sad thoughts abt Cass and Sokrates and their legacies/historical narratives which honestly might need to be a whole other fic
> 
> join me on twitter @s_artemisios for more of my Sokrates/Integrity agenda


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